About Scanning Old Photographs

Scanning old photographs for inclusion in a life story can be a daunting task. Hiring it done can be expensive. If you want to do it yourself with minimum equipment and software cost and still have a story that is attractive and useful for the generations that follow, consider some of the observations listed here. They may make your job a little easier.

Anyone who owns a computer also has equipment to scan and print. The solution for most is a combination unit that will both scan and print. The combination is used for either of those two tasks and is often used as a copier by having the machine do a combination scan and print. Epson and HP, to name a couple, both have inexpensive versions. Along with either of these machines comes a lot of software. The people that produce these machines for mass sales are very competitive; software is an inexpensive way for them to offer more value for the money (and sometimes to make up for the deficiencies in the machines themselves).

It is not meant in this discussion to favor one brand over another but to explain all of the machines on an equal basis is not practical. The machine used behind this discussion is the HP PSC 1501xi. It is probably no better or worse than any of the others, in the same price range, in either performance or software. The HP unit was purchased for under a hundred dollars.

STEP 1:

The first step is to test the equipment and learn the standard scanning procedures at the same time. Select a good black and white picture, as large a one as you can find.

PLEASE NOTE! Never scan any photograph without first making sure there is no dust or other debris on either the scanning surface of the machine or the photograph. Use Windex or the equivalent and a lintless cloth such as Windex Clean and Shine on the glass scanning surface and use the dampened cloth afterwards to wipe off the photograph surface. DO THIS EVERY TIME!

STEP 2:

Our next step is to see if the scanner will do a good job for us.

Place the photograph in one of the corners of the scanning area and scan it using the suggested software procedures. Most scanners will provide a rough scan to start with then the detailed scan on the second scan. Your goal is to make sure that the final scan is adequate. Use reading glasses or a magnifier to examine the image shown on your monitor. Look for streaks and blotches generated by the scanning process by comparing the scanned image on your monitor with the real picture.

Repeat this process by moving the image from location to location over the entire face of the scanner. The machine we used for most of our initial work had a weak scan streak about one inch in from one edge. It showed up as a white streak on the scanned image. Since the scanner was otherwise adequate, we marked the machine with masking tape and used only the surface that tested well.

STEP3:

Once we have faith in the scanner, the next step is to establish a standard procedure for the scanning process so that we can move down through all of the images to be used in the final manuscript as accurately and as quickly as possible.

The major elements in the page formatting of the manuscript will be the size and shape of the image and almost every page in the manuscript will carry an image. A very few pages may carry more than one photograph and correcting a photograph when formatting a page in MSWord can be time-consuming.

Therefore we should scan each photograph so that the final sizing is done on its entry into its resting place on a page when the page is built in MSWord. That means that each photograph we scan must be cropped and sized for the maximum size that a photograph might need when applied.

STEP 4:

Amateur snapshots are not usually well composed and in many cases you will wish that a particular photograph had been a bust instead of a full body length or the photograph may be carrying too much background real estate. You are writing a story about a person and you would like the likeness of the person to be as dominant as possible. Unless the surroundings of the image of the person is pertinent to the story, it should be cut away so the image of the person will be larger in the final viewing. This cutting away of an unwanted part of a picture is called cropping the picture.

The time to crop the picture to its final content is when it is scanned. And, as you will see, it is essential that the cropping of a picture be done before the sizing, and both must be done before the final scanning of the picture.

One must remember that there is an unfortunate conflict between the shape of written documents and the shape of a computer screen used for viewing those documents. Computer screens are being used more and more for viewing movies and so are becoming wider with respect to height. The HDTV standard is now of the ratio of 16 to 9 (1.78:1), whereas the written page standard is based on the 11 by 8.5 shape(1.3:1) that will comfortably support a standard 8" by 10" portrait. We find ourselves building a manuscript in one format that will be displayed in another. So we must keep that in mind.

When the preliminary scan is made, you will note a dotted box around a portion of the screen, usually outlining the image that has been preliminarily scanned. This box has handles on all four corners and at the center of each of the four sides. At the least, use these handles to eliminate the border of the photograph. Study the photograph closely to see if you wish to use all of it or whether you should reshape it. Then crop it if necessary.

After it is cropped, measure the size of the cropped result. If the length is 5" or greater or the width is 4" or greater, then scan at 200 pixels per inch (scanners usually are preset at that figure). If both sides are less than half that, then scan at 300 or more. If the picture is 2" or less then scan at 600. Otherwise the pictures cannot be zoomed to the full size of the screen.

Always save the scanned picture in .jpg format.

STEP 5:

Most of the scanners will have some editing features on the scanning page. Those same scanners have picture editing software. There are also many other very fine editing software packages. We have found it best to use scanning as a function and then editing the scanned results using editing software as a separate function. The two functions are so different that they are more easily done separately.

An extra note: Modern people don't understand black and white. We suggest that ALL photographs and portraits be scanned as color. Most modern scanners do that automatically, but if offered a choice on the scanner and it is a photograph then we suggest you call it color even if it is black and white. The extra tint will soften the impact of a stark black and white picture.